Most security pros concerned about missing threats between vulnerability scans

Posted on 18 February 2014.

Continuous monitoring, whose roots lie with the U.S. government, addresses many of the challenges faced by traditional vulnerability management solutions and offers CISOs and security leaders across sectors a near real-time view into the security posture of their respective institutions.

A new survey found that organizations that implemented continuous monitoring are more than twice as likely to be satisfied with their vulnerability management approach compared to those who use periodic scanning.

Additionally, Forrester asked the 45 percent of respondents who had adopted CM to explain the benefits. They said that continuous monitoring:

Benefits all stages of vulnerability management

Benefits all verticals

Better equips organizations to deal with a mobile workforce

Benefits those with a risk focused VM program the most

Satisfies the CISO more than any other role.

Consumerization, mobility, and cloud are the hallmarks of the extended enterprise, and periodic snapshot vulnerability scanning cannot effectively address the dynamic nature of today’s extended enterprise environments. While this has catapulted vulnerability management as one of the top concerns for organizations – 86 percent of respondents rate it as their second highest IT security priority for the next 12 months – they remain concerned with effectively lowering their organization’s risk of compromise. Specifically, organizations struggle to establish effective vulnerability management practices, leaving them exposed to attacks.

The study found that:

Nearly 74 percent of the surveyed respondents experienced challenges with their overall VM program

79 percent claimed they were more likely to miss critical vulnerabilities due to insufficient data to narrow down appropriate endpoints for scanning

70 percent scan monthly or less.

“The survey shows that although organizations use periodic vulnerability scans, it’s simply not enough,” explained Ron Gula, CEO and CTO of Tenable Network Security. “In today’s environment of mobile, cloud and BYOD, the extended enterprise poses particular challenges, and organizations are finding it difficult to make traditional vulnerability management work for them. The need for security that covers 100 percent of assets all the time has never been more apparent than with the recent series of successful breaches.”

Maintaining a consistent and effective vulnerability management workflow emerged as a major concern with 77 percent of respondents having concerns about accurate asset discovery. The explosion of transient endpoints compounds the difficulties of discovering all an organization’s assets and greatly increases the likelihood of an effective breach if unknown assets are not identified and assessed properly.

Furthermore, 66 percent stated they were not confident in conducting proper vulnerability remediation. Once scans returned the data, they did not feel they had a clear picture of the risks in order to accurately prioritize and take action.

“Periodic vulnerability scans have failed the modern-day CISO,” said Gula. “Breaches are still occurring at an alarming rate, and the threat landscape is ever-evolving. The goal for any CISO is to remain ahead of the threat curve, and the only way to do this is through adopting a continuous monitoring platform. This enables users to rapidly deploy patches to shut down these threats in hours, not months so that dangerous windows of opportunity get shut before business-critical data is compromised.”

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